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Cedar Fair Entertainment announced Friday (PDF) that it is giving up on the park, three years after buying it. The adjoining water park will remain open.

"We've been disappointed with Geauga Lake's attendance since we acquired the park," Cedar Fair spokesman Tony Clark said. The company also owns Cedar Point in Sandusky.

The closure comes as a blow to the community, but not a surprise.

An empty parking lot and short lines for rides might have made the park convenient, but they don't make money.

"I've been going to the park since I was 2 years old," said Christina Altman, 19, an employee of Sirna's Market & Deli across the street from the park's entrance. "That was the only thing we had for kids in this community."

Despite her fond memories, steep ticket prices, expensive food and fewer big attractions kept her away in recent years. It's a problem that the park's previous owners had, and Cedar Fair was unable to fix.

Cedar Fair bought the park in 2004 from Six Flags for $145 million.

Six Flags bought it in 2000, pumped $40 million into rides and saw huge increases in ticket sales. But the euphoria didn't last. The following year, the company bought the adjacent Sea World property and merged the complexes.

Dreams of a regional draw that could compete with premier parks such as Cedar Point didn't materialize. In 2001, ticket sales at the combined park were lower than the prior year.

By the time Cedar Fair bought the facility, attendance was in free fall. The company renamed the park Geauga Lake in hopes of playing on fan nostalgia.

That's too bad. My college roomate lived in Aurora and I would take her home for the weekend pretty often. I remember you could stand in her back yard and hear the seals barking from Sea World......I enjoyed the times I visited

I've never been to Geauga Lake but I used to go to Sea World every year and I still miss it! I have heard from many of my friends and co-workers who have been to Geauga Lake recently that it's nothing like it used to be - the rides are all spread out with nothing new added in years and the water park has been relocated to the Sea World side of the lake. One made the trip just a few weeks ago and said she and her family stayed all day at the water park because it was hot and it was too much effort to run back and forth between the sections. It's still a shame though that no one can figure out how to keep it open.